The City of Estevan has been hard at work keeping their parks pest free - and so far, it's been working.

"We are very fortunate not to have any positive results yet for Dutch Elm disease," shared Parks and Facilities Manager, Rod March, "but we're still monitoring for that."

A few surrounding communities have had positive results come back.

"We are an urban forest island so hopefully people are being respectful of things like the pruning ban. I always remind people, it's quite a hefty fine, $250,000 for a contravention of that regulation. The message is getting out there how important it is to protect the trees and people are being respectful of it for the most part.

He added that last year, all the city-owned elm trees were treated with an insecticide which may have contributed to the lack of diseased trees.

"We'll be redoing that program again next year as part of our preventative maintenance."

He also noted that they haven't seen any evidence of the emerald ash beetle which was also a concern earlier in the spring.

As for other bugs buzzing around, this is the time of year when wasps are more aggressively searching for food.

"It's really yellow jackets that we see here. It's very common, this time of year. From our perspective, the number of calls are way down this year. We haven't experienced high numbers of nests on city properties so from our perspective, it's really low but we do realize that they're out there."

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